Your baby monitor can be hacked. Here's how to avoid it

A couple in Cincinnati recently had their baby monitor hacked. But experts are weighing-in on what you can do to avoid that problem.

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By Herb Scribner

Sault Ste. Marie Evening News - Sault Ste. Marie, MI

By Herb Scribner

Posted Apr. 29, 2014 at 6:19 PM

By Herb Scribner

Posted Apr. 29, 2014 at 6:19 PM

First it was Target. Then it was your online passwords.
Now, chillingly, it's baby monitors.
Time magazine reported Tuesday that Heather and Adam Schreck's baby monitor was hacked, with a voice on the other end shouting at the Schreck's 10-month-old daughter.
"According to Heather Schreck, the stranger was yelling at her 10-month-old daughter Emma, 'Wake up baby. Wake up baby.' Then just screaming at her trying to wake her up," Olivia B. Waxman wrote for Time.
Once Adam Schreck entered the room, the baby-monitoring camera turned towards Schreck and the voice shouted at him, too.
This isn't the first case of someone hacking a baby monitor, as a similar circumstance happened in Houston in summer 2013, Forbes reported. In fact, the Houston case relates back to this recent turn of events, as both hacked monitors were manufactured by Foscam, Time reported.
Hackers can tune into baby monitors at anytime, said Michael Peros, who is "a cyber spy expert," according to First Coast News.
"They would watch the network activity and they would find an IP address with a Mac and gain access to the system with that information," Peros said to FCN, adding that a simple way to avoid getting hacked is removing your monitor from the Internet it's connected to.
But what else can parents do?
Fox 19 in Cincinnati, which originally reported the story about the hacked baby monitors, spoke to experts about what parents can do to keep a creep in the night from cyber entering their baby's bedroom.
"Any kind of Internet-connected device essentially could be subjected to this," said Dave Hatter, a solutions expert for Infinity Partners, told Fox 19. "It's not just that they want to get in and mess with your camera. More sophisticated hackers know they can use this as a launching off point to get into your network and potentially steal your ID or use your network to launch malicious attacks against someone else."
Parents can change their password for their Wi-Fi network, and they can update their cameras consistently as camera manufacturing companies create security updates to ward off hackers, Hatter told Fox 19.
"The Foscam camera, for example, has a known firmware vulnerability and had released an update to correct the problem," Fox 19 reported, "but the Schreck's were unaware of it."%3Cimg%20src%3D%22http%3A//beacon.deseretconnect.com/beacon.gif%3Fcid%3D166446%26pid%3D46%22%20/%3E